Thylias Moss

Until the birth of Limited Fork Poetics in 2004 and LFP’s rebirth as Limited Fork Theory in 2006, Thylias Moss seemed to specialize in placement of text on paper pages, resulting in the publication of ten books, most recently Toyko Butter, a collection of poetry, and the winning of numerous awards and prizes including: a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writer’s Award, the Witter Bynner Prize from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and the grand prize ($25.00) from the Cleveland Public Library in 1975 for “Coming of Age in Sandusky,” the prize that determined her literary destiny.

Within LFT, Thylias Moss discovered an enriched identity as forkergirl who in applying principles of Limited Fork Theory, the study of interacting systems, to thinking and making, produces systems of work (poams: products of act[s] of making) in which form is part of what emerges to be configured and reconfigured in collaborations with idea, access, limits and possibilities sensory perception, time, (temporary) mergers, technologies, and space on multiple scales. Poams are both shifting (on some scale[s]) habitats and shifting (on some scale[s]) populations of habitats.

With a joint appointment in English and Art & Design, Moss continues to explore visual, sonic, and tactile intersections (temporary on some scale[s]) on multiple scales, hoping eventually to incorporate more any olfactory interactions, all toward producing configurable and reconfigurable structures of experience and perception that perhaps can assist in reconfiguring possibilities for meanings of existences that can contribute to policies and actions.

She utilizes multi-tine approaches to anything that has been, is, or can become approachable, imagination functioning as a valid location.